Sass, which is said to be short for “Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets”, is a meta-language that extends CSS3 to do things that plain old CSS can’t do easily or at all, with goodies we’ve come to know and love from our programming languages: variables, nesting, mixins and inheritance. It compiles to well-formatted standard CSS, and you can even have Sass watch your Sass files so that it automatically updates your compiled CSS files as you update your Sass source.

Sass is the creation of Hampton Catlin, a “Shopifriend” and programmer who’s all about optimizing his programming tools. When he got fed up with building HTML templates for his Rails projects, he created the Haml markup language. Haml’s popular enough that it’s found its way into the most unlikely of places, such as the .NET world, where they’ve implemented it as NHaml. Just as Haml is Hampton’s optimization of HTML, Sass is his optimization of CSS.

Pragmatic Guide to Sass is currently in beta. You can get it in ebook format immediately (with downloadable updates as more of the book is finished, including the final, finished ebook) for US$13 or buy the ebook + paper book bundle, where you can get the ebook now and both the paperback edition and the final, finished ebook when the book is complete for US$30.

Brian Alkerton, stand-up comic, karaoke wizard and Shopify Guru — the Gurus are a team that help customers succeed with their online shops — is a travellin’ man this week. He was in Boston earlier, and now he’s in Seattle to attend the PAX conference. He’s also doing some remote work and today, he held “office hours” at the legendary Top Pot Doughnuts on 5th Avenue (a stone’s throw from Hotel Five), which is a great place to get some coffee and delicious toroidal baked goods; it’s also a pretty decent place to get some work done.

While there, Matthew Inman, the twisted comics artist behind The Oatmeal (and Shopify customer) dropped by to chat with Brian. He also gave Brian a wonderfully and disturbingly Oatmeal-esque comic with the caption “Shopify gives me explosive poopies of joy.”

Personally, I think it’s all the fiber — his comic is The Oatmeal, after all — but it’s nice to see that we have another scatologically satisfied customer.

If you’re tired of using the standard “Lorem Ipsum” placeholder text in your projects, try Samuel L. Ipsum instead. It spits out any number of paragraphs of text featuring dialogue from Samuel L. Jackson’s movie characters. Note that I said “spits out” rather than generates: there’s no generation going on here; the underlying JavaScript is obfuscated code that randomly selects one or more Samuel L. Jackson lines from his movies, with repeats allowed. Still, if you’re looking for an amusing change of pace and need text for a mockup or prototype, you might find this handy.

Her focus is on helping startup become lean startups and lean startups thrive. According to Wikipedia, lean startups are born out of three trends, which Eric Ries (who coined and even trademarked the term) states are:

The rise and use of free and open source software

Application of agile software development methods

Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process

Lean startups embrace continuous deployment, where new code gets pushed to production daily, if not multiple times a day. From that approach come a number of follow-up approaches, including:

Testing in actual production environments instead of mock production environments

Getting user feedback from observing user behaviour in the production environment instead of soliciting opinions from users running demo versions

Saying “We don’t even know the problem”, in response to the agile statement of “We don’t know the solution”.